U.S. Expert Thought Mad Cow Was Unlikely in U.S

America's foremost mad cow expert George Gray thought it unlikely that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE (news - web sites)) would find its way into the United States until Tuesday's news of the first reported case.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said Tuesday a single sick dairy cow in Washington state had tested positive for the brain-wasting disease found mainly in Europe.

"I thought it was unlikely but it's not totally surprising," said Gray, a Harvard professor who spent three years studying the disease and its origins for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

In the first major risk assessment of what would happen if mad cow was found in the United States, Gray and a team of academics found in 2001 that chances were the disease would not become a serious threat to herds or to the American food supply chain.

Asked how he thought the disease had arisen in the United States, a perplexed Gray told Reuters, "It proves only one thing ... that somehow it got here."

He downplayed the chances of mad cow disease becoming a wider problem. "I really think that significant spread in this country is highly unlikely," he said.

"We are never going to have the UK's 1,000-a-week cases. We're never going to get to that situation I can say pretty confidently," he added.

Gray said the U.S. government safeguards were adequate enough to deal with the disease, which has never been found in the country before. In May, Canadian officials found a lone case of mad cow disease in an Alberta animal and were never able to pinpoint the cause.

The disease was relatively unknown in the United States until around 1996 when Britain acknowledged that people had died by eating mad-cow-infected meat.

"This is a time to learn a little more and not to panic," Gray cautioned. "Steps taken over the last 15 years means that this disease is unlikely to spread significantly in the U.S," he added.

"I'd say stay calm and let's see what we can learn about this and then figure out what the next steps are. To me there are still things that have to be learned," he said.